Certainly, one of the primary goals of abbreviations in text or Twitter-speak is to condense an utterance so that it fits the 160 character limit of a text-message or the 140 character limit of a Twitter post (or Tweet). However, there is also a certain charm, a certain playfulness, involved. There is pleasure in the act of composing with these constraints, an intentional and curious engagement with how sentences, words, and letters make meaning. Composing a text-message is most certainly a literate (and sometimes even literary) act. And, interestingly, the average text-message distorts grammar much less than the naysayers would have us believe. In fact, more often, text-messages rely on very conventional sentence structures and word order to create clear contexts for the various abridgments. However, like a poem, a text-message has the ability to condense what might otherwise be inexpressible into a very small and self-consciously constrained linguistic space. And, like a poem, a clever text-message unravels, offering layers of meaning and interpretability for the reader. For example, neologisms are quite common in the world of texting. In a recent exchange I had via text, “hiyah” came to mean both a greeting (as in “hi ya”) and the sound-effect accompanying a karate-chop, a calculated portmanteau, a “hello” that feels like an assault. Granted, this sort of inventiveness may not be rampant in the wild, but the medium certainly offers and encourages this potential.

In particular the data show how the Facebookwalls were certainly func-tioning as a valuable means of exchange for those students who were making activeuse of Facebookwith their peers on the course. Indeed, in terms of education-relatedinteraction, Facebookwas used primarily for maintainingstrong links between peoplealready in relatively tight-knit, emotionally close offline relationships, rather thancreating new points of contact with a ‘glocalised’ community of students from othercourses or even institutions. In this sense we would concur with Ellison’s conclusionthat Facebookrepresents an ‘offline to online trend’ in that it serves a geographicallybound campus community, as opposed to the ‘online to offline trend’ often identifiedby internet researchers where people meet up with previously unknown online‘buddies’ in real life (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe 2007, 1144).